might have said something like: “Malinka’s mother once cleaned some famous people’s apartment, and you can’t imagine how filthy they were!” But it might have been another sentence entirely, because, as after a dream, she couldn’t recapture it after she’d spoken it, or rather after Richard Rivière told her she had.
He didn’t bother to ask who Malinka might be, and Clarisse only gave a quiet little laugh.
Eyes flooding with tears, she stared at her husband’s shoulder, reminding herself that she could press her face to it whenever she liked.
—
After many elaborate calculations, Richard Rivière decided they could safely take out a loan, and they bought an almost new house on the edge of Langon.
He never talked much about his work at Alfa Romeo, but Clarisse understood that his devotion, his patience, the exercises he did with a manual in the evening, striving to learn everything he needed to know about the various finance plans he might offer the customers but also to work up a smooth and persuasive pitch, all these labors, she understood, were aimed at his goal of becoming a sales manager and even, one day, the general manager of his own dealership. He obliquely admitted as much, then never brought it up again.
That reserve was just fine with Clarisse, who took to visiting Malinka’s mother the first Tuesday of each month, never saying so but never lying outright.
She simply announced that she would be going to Bordeaux the next day, and Richard Rivière never asked what she had planned, but only smiled in that way of his, which she loved more than anything else, at once tender and absent, as if nothing really interested him but what he had in his mind at that moment, something to do with his work, she imagined.
It did not escape Clarisse Rivière that she loved his sweetly inattentive smile because it proved that she lived not in the very heart of his thoughts but a little outside, in a warm place, perhaps veiled by a serene shadow.
But that was just where she wanted to be, the better to safeguard her secret, to uphold her responsibility to the servant, on whom she heaped ever-more-generous attentions.
Her love for her mother was a foul-tasting food, impossible to choke down. That food dissolved into bitter little crumbs in her mouth, then congealed, and this went on and on and had no end, the lump of fetid bread shifting from one cheek to the other, then the soft, stinking fragments that made of her mouth a deep pit of shame.
She began bringing a little gift each time she went to visit Malinka’s mother.
She noted certain changes in her mother’s personality and behavior, that woman who, when they lived in the little house, never let any sorrow or displeasure trouble her eternal good humor or shrink the enormity of her indifference, and she was so aggrieved to see the servant turning suspicious and caustic, and sometimes even belligerent, that she longed to throw herself into the river, not to die but only to float, to drift toward the sea, toward the disappearance of all memory of her and the servant’s existence, toward absolution for all the wrongs she’d done her mother.
It was only her great debt to her mother that kept her from abandoning her anew in this way. But nothing shocked her more than to hear sarcastic asides and impotent little barbs flowing from her mother’s lips, that vile vermin being vomited up. She thought fate had mixed up her face with her mother’s, that it was she who, her voice ever gentle and calm, was befouling the honor of precious stones, of diamonds, and the still-greater dignity of self-mastery.
For even the servant didn’t recognize herself.
She would snicker sardonically as Clarisse entered the apartment, then fall silent, sorry and bewildered, and clap her hand to her mouth. She would mumble an excuse, and Clarisse realized she was afraid her daughter might stop coming to visit if she was mean to her (because that, oh, that was how the servant put
He didn’t bother to ask who Malinka might be, and Clarisse only gave a quiet little laugh.
Eyes flooding with tears, she stared at her husband’s shoulder, reminding herself that she could press her face to it whenever she liked.
—
After many elaborate calculations, Richard Rivière decided they could safely take out a loan, and they bought an almost new house on the edge of Langon.
He never talked much about his work at Alfa Romeo, but Clarisse understood that his devotion, his patience, the exercises he did with a manual in the evening, striving to learn everything he needed to know about the various finance plans he might offer the customers but also to work up a smooth and persuasive pitch, all these labors, she understood, were aimed at his goal of becoming a sales manager and even, one day, the general manager of his own dealership. He obliquely admitted as much, then never brought it up again.
That reserve was just fine with Clarisse, who took to visiting Malinka’s mother the first Tuesday of each month, never saying so but never lying outright.
She simply announced that she would be going to Bordeaux the next day, and Richard Rivière never asked what she had planned, but only smiled in that way of his, which she loved more than anything else, at once tender and absent, as if nothing really interested him but what he had in his mind at that moment, something to do with his work, she imagined.
It did not escape Clarisse Rivière that she loved his sweetly inattentive smile because it proved that she lived not in the very heart of his thoughts but a little outside, in a warm place, perhaps veiled by a serene shadow.
But that was just where she wanted to be, the better to safeguard her secret, to uphold her responsibility to the servant, on whom she heaped ever-more-generous attentions.
Her love for her mother was a foul-tasting food, impossible to choke down. That food dissolved into bitter little crumbs in her mouth, then congealed, and this went on and on and had no end, the lump of fetid bread shifting from one cheek to the other, then the soft, stinking fragments that made of her mouth a deep pit of shame.
She began bringing a little gift each time she went to visit Malinka’s mother.
She noted certain changes in her mother’s personality and behavior, that woman who, when they lived in the little house, never let any sorrow or displeasure trouble her eternal good humor or shrink the enormity of her indifference, and she was so aggrieved to see the servant turning suspicious and caustic, and sometimes even belligerent, that she longed to throw herself into the river, not to die but only to float, to drift toward the sea, toward the disappearance of all memory of her and the servant’s existence, toward absolution for all the wrongs she’d done her mother.
It was only her great debt to her mother that kept her from abandoning her anew in this way. But nothing shocked her more than to hear sarcastic asides and impotent little barbs flowing from her mother’s lips, that vile vermin being vomited up. She thought fate had mixed up her face with her mother’s, that it was she who, her voice ever gentle and calm, was befouling the honor of precious stones, of diamonds, and the still-greater dignity of self-mastery.
For even the servant didn’t recognize herself.
She would snicker sardonically as Clarisse entered the apartment, then fall silent, sorry and bewildered, and clap her hand to her mouth. She would mumble an excuse, and Clarisse realized she was afraid her daughter might stop coming to visit if she was mean to her (because that, oh, that was how the servant put
Similar Books
